How to build confidence from scratch (Part 2)
In part 2 of this series on confidence, we’re talking about building confidence from the ground up. It doesn’t matter if you currently feel like you’re starting from zero, we’re going to talk about the basics of how to change the way you’re interacting with the world starting from how you feel about yourself.
If you missed the previous article in this series where I deep dove into defining what confidence is, I highly recommend you go read that first and then come back here - you’ll get way more out of the rest of the article!
To recap, let’s remember what we’re talking about when we’re discussing confidence.
Where to start when confidence is low
Confidence is not an emotion that we will feel that will make us believe we can do something or that it will all work out or that will create motivation from anywhere.
Confidence will not change the facts of our life. It won’t make us shorter or taller, it won’t give us a different boss or give us abs or get a friend to listen to us.
Confidence doesn’t change the ways of the world to make everything work out for you. It might seem that way externally when you look at other confident people but this is an illusion.
Confidence IS a mindset where you believe that you can handle each situation regardless of the outcome. It’s a frame of mind through which you see the world. (For more explanation of this definition, make sure you go back and read part 1 of this series)
So while confidence won’t give you abs, a confident person believes that they can handle a shitty workout OR a great one and as a result, they go to the gym. And over time, they might get abs. It wasn’t really the confidence that did this but rather their willingness to try.
Reframing confidence for more success
It’s easy to look at confident people and think “it must be easy for them to be confident - they look like that” or “they’re already successful” or “people take them seriously.” We frame it in our minds that the confidence comes from the achievement or the external reality and because we don’t have those things (and may never have them, in the case of a certain height or unchangeable physical attributes), it’s harder for us to be confident.
But that’s backwards. Those people have those things - the businesses, appearance, flexibility, whatever it is - as a result of their confidence. They had a mindset of being able to handle success or failure, so they were willing to put themselves in situations where they risked both and over time, they accumulated more successes!
So as we talk about building confidence, it’s always important to remember:
You’re not chasing a feeling, you’re creating a mindset - which means focusing on your conscious thoughts and actions, the things you can control, vs. waiting for a feeling to occur in our body to give us permission or motivation to take a next step
Your focus should be getting more comfortable with the “bad” outcome happening (or just the uncertainty of not knowing which outcome will happen) so that you can take the risk to potentially get the “good” outcome - the more that we can de-stigmatize whatever it is your avoiding, the more effective we’ll be at getting over those fear instincts that might be stopping you from starting and will help you support yourself if it does happen to keep going rather than shrink back into a shell.
How do you build confidence?
The path to building confidence is a three legged stool: mind, body and background. One or two will probably help but with all three, you’ll notice significantly more progress toward consistently being in the mindset of confidence. So let’s break it down…
Mind - how can I frame this situation in a way that supports me?
Because confidence is a mindset, not an emotion - we can cultivate it over time. But if you’re starting from scratch, the most important thing is to try to use your brain not to spiral into doubt and negative self-talk but instead to try to be your own support system.
This is way easier said than done because you probably have years of habits of beating yourself up, of not believing in yourself etc.
The key here is not to try to go from zero to one hundred from scratch. You’re not likely to be able to wake up one day and have fully positive self-talk, to face disappointment without beating up on yourself, etc.
What you can reasonably do is identify a slightly more supportive or constructive perspective to each situation. I recommend whenever you’re facing a situation and feeling low confidence, you try to come back to one of the following questions (or use as many as you like):
Am I more likely to get what I want by trying and failing or not trying at all?
How might trying this and it not working out be the best thing to ever happen to me?
If a future version of me who already has the thing I want were talking to me right now, what advice might they give me right now?
Asking these sorts of questions can help you short circuit whatever fear story you’re telling yourself in the moment about how terrible things might feel if the situation doesn’t play out the way you want it to and refocus your attention on the fact that taking this risk opens up more possibility for you getting what you want than doing nothing.
Remember, the mindset of confidence is risk-tolerant. Confident people go after what they want because they think it’s possible, not because it’s guaranteed.
They go on the date, ask for the raise, post the video knowing they might get dumped, get told no or get 300 views but they do it anyway because they know that the risk opens up the possibility for reward.
If you feel like you have a long history of not getting the rewards, it’s not because you’re not worthy or good enough to get those things, you have to realize that the confident people out there probably have faced as many if not way way more failures than you have but were willing to keep going and eventually saw the rewards come through.
Our mind is a powerful component of confidence because you will continually be coaching yourself to make decisions from the confident place rather than the fear-based place. This gets easier over time when you start to reduce the fear of failure but even confident people need to coach themselves to do the scary thing!
Body - how can I support my emotions such that they don’t hold me back?
We’ve already established that confidence isn’t an emotion but that doesn’t mean that emotions don’t play a huge role in confidence. I think one of the biggest blocks to building confidence, which you don’t see a lot of people talk about is your ability to process difficult emotions.
If you are completely sidelined by disappointment when a date doesn’t go well, then of course, it would be more and more difficult over time for you to put yourself out there for the next date because the pain of if things don’t go well looms so large.
We are in our best state of confidence when we are neutral about the outcomes - think about asking your friend to do you a totally no big deal favor like hold your coffee while you tie your shoe. You’re not the least bit scared to ask them to do it because if they say no, maybe because their own hands are full, you’ll just put your coffee down on the ground while you tie your shoe. No harm, no foul. Because there wasn’t a fear of either outcome, there’s no fear in making the ask.
But in most situations we think of requiring confidence, we have built up such emotional memory of the big feelings we felt when something didn’t work out for us that it makes us scared to take the risk now. The memory of what it felt like to get excluded in kindgergarten, say, makes it way scarier to ask to sit with a group of coworkers. Our body reminds us of the potential pain from the past which affects our willingness to take healthy risk in the present.
So how do we change this moving forward? We have to learn to support ourselves through the difficult feelings that might come up in life so we can train ourselves that actually we can handle it if things go wrong.
The more we fear these so-called negative emotions, the more we fear situations that might trigger them, like a date gone poorly, a declined promotion or a conversation gone wrong. But in order to get the things we want in life, we cannot completely avoid the possibility for these “bad” outcomes.
You have a decision to make - do you want to minimize difficult feelings or maximize positive outcomes? You can’t do both. Here’s an example to paint a picture as to why…
Imagine you’re a baseball player standing at home plate. Your coach has told you that your entire goal is to not miss a pitch. How many is the best number of swings for you to take to make sure you never swing and miss? ZERO. Every swing involves the risk of a miss so if you can’t risk missing, don’t swing.
On the other hand, now your coach says to you that your entire goal is to hit home runs. How many is the best number of swings to hit the most home runs? A LOT. At first, you’d probably be swinging a ton just to learn how to hit home runs and then you’d probably be learning how swing for more pitches to give yourself more opportunities, while still being smart about not getting injured or burnt out.
To get the good outcome (home runs), we have to allow for the difficult feelings around failure. And when we live our lives avoiding difficult feelings, we will naturally be taking fewer swings (because we’re scared of misses) and as a result, prevent ourselves from the learning, experience and even the chance to get the positive outcomes.
But when you’ve lived your life thus far minimizing difficult situations because the negative emotions that come up scare you, how do you shift this? We understand that the fears and doubts about the difficult situations are natural, so how can we convince our brain that we should take the risk anyway?
This is why we need to focus on fearing those negative emotions less so it’s less scary to take more action. If the last time you were ghosted, you felt sad, disappointed and a little angry and all in, those emotions were a level 8 out of 10 difficult, when you consider dating again, your body is signaling to you that this is an action with the risk of an 8 out of 10 feeling.
How much more willing do you think you’d be to go on a date if instead your body was signalling to you that it was an action with the risk of a 4 out of 10 feeling? A 2 out of 10?
It’s not the game of preventing the sadness, disappointment or anger because remember even confident people feel those emotions. The emotions themselves aren’t the problem, it’s the intensity of the fear around them that’s keeping you from acting.
What does this look like practically? This is a category of practice called emotional regulation (and it’s closely related cousin, somatic healing). It’s helping your body learn to be okay with your feelings without sending you into fight or flight, which is its naturally instinct.
Depending on the emotion that comes up, the support will be different. When we’re sad, our body wants to cocoon and retreat so often swaying and rubbing your chest, like you’d do for a small child can help you move the sadness out of your body rather than collapsing in on yourself. It seems so simple but when I’m sad and starting to feel numbness or a desire to curl up in a ball, if I sit up and sway while rubbing my own chest and breathing, 80% of the time I cry within 2-3 minutes and through allowing the emotions to release, feel better on the other side.
Anger on the other hand is more of an activating emotion - it wants to rile you up. For these types of emotions, it’s about releasing the excess energy, so shaking your body, flicking your hands like you’re flicking water off or bouncing up and down can help get that energy out.
One of my favorite resources that’s a wealth of knowledge in terms of emotional regulation is To Be Magnetic. They educate about it a lot throughout their program (which covers a huge range of topics) but they also have a podcast that often brings on guests who are experts in this area and teach a lot about it. (FYI - because I recommend them so often, they gave me a code for 15% off at checkout for either an annual or monthly plan when you use code SAMANTHA)
This probably won’t feel like it’s helping you feel more confident in the moment - in fact, it might feel like you’re bringing up a bunch more than you already had. But in my experience, if you’re struggling with low confidence, there’s probably some difficult feelings that you’ve been suppressing that have played a role in getting your confidence to where it is, so while it might take a while, letting those feelings come up and using tools like emotional regulation (often alongside other tools like therapy, coaching, somatic healing, etc.) can help you be more comfortable with your own emotions.
The more you know you can feel sad, angry, guilty, etc. without triggering the big fear reactions, the less scary those emotions feel moving forward, helping you feel more comfortable stepping into situations where you might feel them.
And over time, that comfort while help you cultivate confidence in new situations because you’ll have more and more faith that you can support yourself through whatever might come up on the other side!
Background - how can I set myself up for future success with the way I build my life?
So you’re working with your conscious mind and you’re learning to manage and process your emotions, but what if nothing’s changing? This is where the third leg of the three legged stool of confidence comes in.
Confidence is fundamentally a mindset but that doesn’t mean that the only way we create it is by tending to our internal world.
Our external world is a manifestation of our internal world. How clean your apartment is, your exercise routine, your work habits, the contents of your closet, the contents of your bank account, your friendships and so much more are all the external manifestations of how you feel about yourself.
But that doesn’t mean that it has to all go inside out. In fact, one of the most basic ways to begin building confidence from scratch is to begin to make adjustments to your external world to reflect the way you want to see yourself.
Think back to that person we talked about at the beginning of the article who you might have looked at and said “it must be easy for them to be confident - look at their wardrobe/house/job/etc.” You saw their outside world and it signaled to you that they had things to feel good about.
Now we have to be careful here because I am NOT saying that if you have good clothes, you’ll be confident. Or getting a fancy job will make you confident in your intellect or skills. It’s not the job or the clothes that creates confidence because we know confidence is a mindset. While putting on a sharp outfit might be a nice jumpstart to feeling put together, it doesn’t last all day, month or year.
On the other hand, changing our mindset can sometimes feel super amorphous. What isn’t amorphous is how tidy we keep our space or whether we’re proud of how we look when we leave the house. And often by doing these practical things, we can begin to accumulate more proof to support the beliefs we want to have about ourselves like “I can handle this situation regardless of the outcome.”
So if you’re getting lost in how to change your mindset, it might be better for you to start with some practical things with more physical results that can help you collect proof that you are doing better than you used to be.
What the right things for you to do will depend on each individual person. And this isn’t an opportunity to just add 5 extra things to your to do list that you can beat up on yourself later for not having accomplished.
I like to think about this category of building confidence as little boosts for myself. If you notice that the thing you are often fear-mongering yourself about is your appearance (”I’m not that attractive, why would he want to go out with me” or “I don’t look the part of the VP, there’s no way they’ll promote me”) then identifying a couple steps you could do for yourself that would serve as little boosts could help you shift your energy around this belief.
For me, if you dug into why I thought certain women were ending up with the types of guys I was interested in, I was telling myself a narrative around them being more polished or put together than I was. This was my personal story - some people might be telling themselves that those other women were sexier or more impressive or softer - the story always depends on your own wounds and insecurities. But because I knew mine, I then asked myself what I was noticing in myself that wasn’t polished. My answers ranged from big things like the quality of clothes that they wore to little things like their hair was always beautifully curled and their nails always looked good. I knew that curling my hair and doing my nails wasn’t going to solve the whole problem of me feeling better about myself but I know the power of the external world helping us cue our internal world so I started challenging myself to take an extra 10 minutes a few times a week to do my hair more regularly. And I started painting my nails at home more regularly, even learning to file my nails to the shape that I associated with these polished women.
Did these little changes completely change my mindset? No. But when I caught myself in negative thoughts, I could look down (or in the mirror) and see that I was closer to the image that I wanted to have of myself than I had been the year before and this proof helped me jumpstart into the frame of mind I wanted to have.
This piece is actually even more powerful on non-appearance based things. If you want to be a better presenter at work and you identify that one of the big things holding you back is how articulate you feel at answering questions after your conversation, you could ask a friendly coworker to set up a weekly chat between the two of you where you present a silly three slide deck on some pop culture happening and have her ask you questions. Even though it’s not a formal presentation setting, if you get practice answering questions after a presentation and do it without issue, when you are in the real presentation setting, you will have more evidence for your brain to point to that you’re capable of handling the situation.
Where to go from here
If you make small strides in all three of these pillars - shifting your mindset to focus on how either outcome of a situation could be good, helping your body to process and tolerate difficult emotions so a negative outcome that might trigger difficult emotions feels less scary and finally, taking steps in your day-to-day life that give you more evidence for the self-image you want to have, over time it’s impossible for you to not begin to develop more confidence.
If you are feeling stuck, worthless, or a lost cause, you are not. But you will not believe that you are enough, worthy and have plenty of opportunity unless you make changes to shift you out of that state. So start with little bits of these at a time and allow for the process to be slow. I know you want to be out of this place as quickly as you can but you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew and end up feeling like you just proved your negative thoughts right. Far better to take manageable steps and build up positive evidence slowly over time.
If you have more questions about how to build confidence, feel free to submit a question via this form. I try to answer them in upcoming newsletters and blog posts and I’ll try to add more clarity where needed so we can get you on the path to more and more confidence.
Every journey starts with the first step - you got this!